The Sasol guide is cost effective and can be loaded on a Blackberry or other mobile device like iPhone or iPad .The Roberts is more detailed and expensive and is also available for iPhone or iPad.Ultimately if you start with the Sasol you'll love it so much you'll also want the Roberts in due course!Enjoy

I find these Apps very frustrating in the long term. I have the original Roberts for a PDA. Now that the PDA batteries don't hold their charge, and all sorts of other crap and costs associated with the upkeep of "another electronic device" plus I cannot transfer this thing to a new mobile device because it is not compatible. I may as well throw it away. The same will be true for the sasol birds my wife got for her i-Pad in a few years it will be redundant. So the cost adds up on these things that you have to get a new disk/app every few years which becomes expensive. In comparison, I still have and use my first edition of Newmans (the book) without any problems!

To be honest, these days the only thing I use are the calls. I have a camera to take images, a book and internet to look them up. An app with the calls would be the most useful, compact cheap and easy to transfer from one device to another.

I guess if you have loads of cash, and enjoy the techno stuff, then the Roberts is still better than the much improved version of Sasol.

I have the Sasol book on my iPhone. What I found very helpful was that you could also search the index by the Afrikaans names. I downloaded the upgrade a couple of days ago only to discover the Afrikaans name option has been removed - problem for me as I know most birds only by their Afrikaans names. So if you are in the same boat, do not install the upgrade

I started to download the app. I thought that it would be useful for times when I just have no book available. I am having a problem completing the download and don't know where I might have gone wrong.

As a novice birder, I thought that it would be a perfect tool.

Just a question. Are the costs just added to the cell phone account? If that is the case, I might well have paid without any benefit to date.

The bird doesn't sing because it has answers, it sings because it has a song.

Sasol is great in many ways, but there is one monumental flaw: My Lists. It sucks.

I spent 30 hours transferring (without any predictive text!) hundreds of entries, constantly having to retype all of the place names etc, each time. There are several other fairly minor glitches, but a huge oversight on the part of the developers, was the ability to import lists.

Sure, you can export your lists, just right click on 'more' on the home page....just don't try to import them back in!

The computer I was using for iTunes died suddenly and I installed iTunes on the new one. At first Sasol refused to sync and was in my library, but not on my tablet. Then an iPad update was offered which allowed my tablet to finally sync. Sasol re-appeared, but sans My Lists! No problem, you'd think - the nice chaps at Sasol would have thought of this, but no....they didn't.

I have indeed got My Lists exported via email, safely on a remote computer, but no way to get it back onto my tablet.

If Roberts were to offer the app for both iPhone AND iPad, instead of forcing you to choose or pay twice, I'd be in like Flynn...

I bought the Sasol App for my ipad but it seems that a good number of birds, in particular those in the NW of South Africa, are missing, is that correct? Are the printed version and/or the electronic Roberts more extensive?